Kagan Rejects Suggestions By GOP Senators She Authored Language in Key ACOG Statement on Partial-Birth Abortion
Documents that show Kagan’s “suggested option” was used verbatim in the final “Statement on Intact Dilitation and Extraction” ACOG released on January 12, 1997, and was ultimately quoted in the Supreme Court majority opinion in the case of Stenberg vs. Carhart, striking down Nebraska’s ban on partial-birth abortion.
By Jane McGrath at CNSNews.com
Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, under questioning last week from the Senate Judiciary Committee, would neither admit to nor confirm suggestions by two top Republican senators that, during her time as a lawyer in the Clinton White House, she influenced the language of a 1996 public policy statement on partial-birth abortion issued by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). That key statement affected the debate over a ban on partial-birth abortion.
Kagan was questioned last week by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) about language that she suggested in the 1996 documents. That language made its way not only into ACOG’s public policy pronouncement on partial-birth abortion, but also into the Supreme Court decision striking down Nebraska’s partial-birth abortion ban, Stenberg v. Carhart.
“When Congress debated the ban on partial-birth abortion, one issue was whether this particularly gruesome abortion method was medically necessary,” Hatch said to Kagan during day three of her Senate confirmation hearing.
“The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, or ACOG as they call it, is a natural source of medical opinion on this subject,” Hatch explained. “According to the documents we (the Senate Judiciary Committee) received, you wrote a memo to your superiors in the Clinton White House about this, that the ACOG was considering a statement that its experts’ panel found no circumstances under which partial-birth abortion was the only option for saving the life or preserving the health of the woman. You wrote, “This of course would be disaster.”
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